Northern Fishermen's Assets Under Foreclosure? Written by Wendy Auxillou Saturday, 05 May 2007

An ad appearing in the Amandala of this week (May 6) shows the DFC (Development Finance Corporation) announcing its intended foreclosure of many of the Northern Fishermen's Cooperative's assets located in Belize City, Caye Caulker and Mango Creek.

Two years or so ago, then Registrar of Cooperatives, Zenaida Moya, sounded alarm bells when a report on the state of affairs of the cooperative she had compiled showed the administrators / managers of the cooperative granting themselves hefty payroll advances/ loans.

An emergency election was called, and a new board of directors for the corporation was elected.

In a surprising turn of events, the new board immediately endorsed the same administrators / managers mentioned in the article as having granted themselves the loans.

Northern Fishermen Co-op in trouble with D.F.C. loanAnyone who reads the newspapers each week cannot help but observe the endless pages of foreclosure notices against borrowers by their respective financial institutions, most notably the D.F.C. And while it's not surprising to find an occasional friend or well known person on the list of unfortunates, this weekend's Amandala newspaper contained a shocker: The Northern Fishermen Cooperative, for decades a shining example of grassroots economic power, is in danger of losing everything because it cannot repay its loans. What went wrong? Our newsroom contacted long-time co-op manager Robert Usher, who said that due to the delicate nature of ongoing negotiations with the D.F.C. he could not divulge details. He did say, however, that in cooperation with the lender Northern was seeking to restructure and refinance its debt; that progress was being made and he was confident that a satisfactory solution would be found. While Usher declined to divulge the size of the D.F.C. debt, he did allow that as part of the restructuring, Northern would be disposing of assets--primarily land--that were outside of its core fish and seafood processing business and would tighten up on its efforts to recover loans made to many of its close to eight hundred members.

It is not known how many of its members' loans are in default, but it should be recalled that in 2004 the co-op came under heavy official criticism from then registrar of cooperatives Zenaida Moya, whose report indicated that Northern had issued large unsecured loans and salary advances totalling millions of dollars to committee members and key employees ... while at the same time running up large back overdrafts at high interest rates. At that time we had reported the co-op's total indebtedness at around twelve million dollars, but a current figure could not be confirmed.